


Prompt: Like Breath, Like Blood, Like Bone

by EssayOfThoughts



Series: MCU Maximoff Oneshots [88]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Wanda Maximoff, Codependency, Gen, HYDRA are bastards, not that she isn't usually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 14:22:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7466685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EssayOfThoughts/pseuds/EssayOfThoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s a <i>trap,”</i> Steve said. (She could see, all the same, the image of someone running across his mind, someone important to him and yet not lost.)</p><p>There was scarlet coiling in her hands - she may have hated to see minds then, after all that had happened, but this scarlet, the scarlet of flesh, came easily - and she was surprised that none of them seemed to expect it as the burst caught them all.</p><p>“You would do the same, in my position.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prompt: Like Breath, Like Blood, Like Bone

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt on my tumblr, readable [Here](http://essayofthoughts.tumblr.com/post/147290025325/so-imma-keep-the-gushing-to-a-minimum-cause).

**i.**  
It wasn’t a word. It wasn’t any of the things they made Pietro say that made Wanda know it was him.

Wanda knew her brother, knew him like breath, like blood, like bone. She saw him bleeding, panting in the video and she did not _need_  anything to know it was her brother. He was her twin. How could she not know him?

(There was a brief moment, when the men in HYDRA uniform were silent, and Wanda can hear what Pietro was humming under his breath. Their mother’s old lullaby.)

There was no question in her mind, as she watched the video, that somehow HYDRA found her brother and brought him back to life.

 

* * *

 

 **ii.**  
“Wanda-”

“Witch-”

“ _Wanda-”_

Wanda didn’t stop. She knew where her armour was kept, where the Quinjets were, recalled how to fly one and the memories guided her as all that ran through her mind was  _PietroPietroPietro,_ a perfect litany of her brother’s name.

Someone set a hand on her shoulder and she responded with a bolt of scarlet, spinning on her heel to see who touched her.

“Do not,” she said. She could see the others, Steve stumbling back from her scarlet, Sam and Rhodey, Nat and Vision, all close behind. “Do not. He is my _brother.”_

“It’s a _trap_ ,” Steve said. (She could see, all the same, the image of someone running across his mind, someone important to him and yet not lost.)

There was scarlet coiling in her hands - she may have hated to see minds then, after all that had happened, but this scarlet, the scarlet of flesh, came easily - and she was surprised that none of them seemed to expect it as the burst caught them all.

“You would do the same, in my position.”

 

* * *

 

 **iii.**  
She knew how to fire up the Quinjet. Knew which switches to flip, which buttons to press, how to steer the craft into the air and away.

 _To Sokovia_ , she thought. _To home_.

(The question: was it home because it was Sokovia, or was it home because Pietro was there?)

(Wanda didn’t care. She would have her brother back.)

 

* * *

 

 **iv.**  
There was the castle.

(There was the chasm.)

The Quinjet was cloaked and much as she might hate Stark his cloaking tech was the best in the world. She set it down under an outcropping of rock, a place where the castle wouldn’t notice it from their angle even with cloaking off.

(She could see the chasm down the ramp, where Ultron had torn her city into the sky.)

Wanda stripped quickly, changed from skirts and shirts to her body armour. She kept her boots, her gloves, her rings. Pinned her hair back with the scarlet headpiece they’d created to help bolster her fading mental powers. (Fading from lack of use, not from anything else. She had shunned them since she lost her brother.)

(Now, though, now she would get him back, and she could shun them no longer.)

Wanda pulled her coat on, looked out into the bleak bright light of the mountains. The castle was just visible above the rim of the chasm, if she leaned back far enough, and she could see the minds glowing out from it.

(Deep, deep within it she could see her brother’s shining blue. She knew that chamber. She knew how to reach it.)

Wanda launched herself into the air, and climbed the chasm.

 

* * *

 

 **v.  
** There were reasons they had their powers, she thought as she climbed out of the chasm, up the path towards the castle. Pietro’s speed was all he had ever wanted, the speed to take her to safety, to fight people and to _end_  the fight before it ever reached her. (The ability to heal fast enough that she would never have to worry for him.)

Her powers, her darting, dancing scarlet was _everything_ , the means to their vengeance, to their safety, to planning far ahead and protecting their bodies and minds and shared split soul.

Pietro would always protect her, yes, but he needed her to be there for him to guard. 

Wanda would tear the world down for Pietro, regardless of if he was alive or dead.

 

* * *

 

 **vi.**  
_Doesn’t anyone here understand?_  she thought. She walked down the corridor, a scarlet shield in front of her, her scarlet like swords against those trying to stop her. _This is **Pietro**. There is nothing I will not do for him._

She walked on, patient, purposeful, as inexorable as a tectonic plate. A mind here, a mind there, scarlet sent to make them wink out.

 _This is for Pietro_ , she thought. _My version of his dance of death._

 

* * *

 

 **vii.**  
She saw the mind of the man behind the door long before she entered the room. His was a quiet mind, a dark mind, one that begged eyes to glance over it without noticing. Were it not for the headpiece she almost certainly would have, and without Pietro’s darting eyes she would not have been prepared.

 _ **No,**_  she thought with pure fierce fury as the man reached out with a cattle-prod, and hurled him into the wall.

 

* * *

 

 **viii.**  
_Pietro_ , she thought.

“ _Pietro,”_ she breathed.

 _Wanda,_ said his mind, opening to hers like a blooming flower. He hung in his restraints, limp and tired and covered in sweat. Wanda combed back sticky strands of hair with careful fingers as he leaned into the touch.

He barely had the breath to speak and that terrified her.

 _Pietro,_  she thought, and then louder, bolder, _**Pietro**_. 

“Am here,” he managed, and Wanda’s fingers flicked scarlet towards the restraints that held him up.

“Stay upright,” she asked of him. Pietro chuckled, shifted his feet, somehow, for all his exhaustion, straightening up. She could see his mind, shining.

 _For you,_ he was thinking. _All my strength is yours._

There was blue rising up through his mind, pure as water, shining as the stars, strong and certain as the tides, reinforcing everything. 

_For you._

 

* * *

 

 **ix.**  
The corridor was empty. Pietro leaned against Wanda, drawing strength from her presence.

Wanda sent scarlet darting down stone pathways to check for safety, one hand cupping her brother’s jaw. “How?”

Pietro’s words were barely a sigh. “HYDRA,” he said. “Our records, from the tests-”

(Wanda remembered the tests, being asked, over and over and over, to do this or that or yet another thing. Remembered Pietro, exhausted, sweaty, bruised, and watching every bruise healing up.)

“They knew,” she murmured, “That you would heal.”

Wanda could see his mind opening, offering memories that he did not have the words to explain just then. She took them, spread them out in her mind with a spray of scarlet.

 

* * *

 

 **x.**  
_Remember,_  Pietro’s mind said, _How I would sleep like the dead some days_?

Wanda remembered. Wanda _hated_. Memories danced out, played out against the dark stone of the cathedral of her mind, showed Pietro’s glimpses of the world through half-closed lids while he - barely conscious, barely _alive_  - was moved from the base to elsewhere.

 _They gave me no body to bury_ , Wanda thought.

 _Because they’d already taken me_ , Pietro replied.

Deep in Wanda the scarlet _burned_.

 

* * *

 

**xi.**  
_The took him, they took him, they_ **_took him from me._ **

Wanda had not been this furious in years. Fury was for Pietro, Pietro who burned with each emotion he felt. Wanda felt carefully, trod out each tentative path, learned to tuck away anger or save it for something useful, to channel it into planning and protecting.

Her scarlet, sent darting down halls to find the safe path out found soldier and soldier and soldier, all set on keeping them trapped within.

Wanda’s scarlet _burned_.

 

* * *

 

 **xii.**  
Pietro knew he was slowing Wanda - _he,_ of all people, slowing his sister - but could not do anything to change it. He was too tired, too tested, days gone without sleep or food and barely enough water. He had strength enough to stand, strength enough to speak, strength enough to walk, but no more. No more than that.

(His strength was in Wanda, and Wanda needed it to fight.)

There were people and people and more people, and they reached the courtyard to find an army and an energy-tank waiting for them.

(It was, all of it, aimed at them.)

(Wanda’s scarlet shield strengthened, rivulets of red power coiling up the headpiece that framed her face like a crown.)

Something crashed through the wall.

 

* * *

 

 **xiii.**  
“Hello Maximoffs,” said the thing which just broke through the wall and it was _Stark_  of all people. “Cap said you’d legged it to rescue your brother, Witch. Thought you might need a hand.”

Wanda did not need to look at Pietro to know he was thinking the exact same thing.  _Not from you_.

 

* * *

 

 **xiv.**  
Stark flew the Quinjet back. Any other time Wanda would have refused this, any other time Stark _wouldn’t be here_. 

But Stark had dropped a tank into the chasm, helped her scour the castle clean while Pietro had barely the strength to stand.

With Pietro back, with the headpiece bolstering her powers Wanda could see Stark’s mind, all its chaotic surface thoughts and the deep well of grief and guilt and issues beneath. _I want to make amends_ , it said. _I don’t know how. But I will._

Wanda let Pietro rest his head on her lap, and tried not to think how the team would react to what she did.

 

* * *

 

 **xv.**  
“Wanda!”

“Oh, thank _God_.”

“Pietro!”

The last was said by Clint in a voice of gasping, grateful, surprise as he helped Wanda balance her brother and keep him from falling.

“Come on,” the Captain said, hand scratching the back of his head. “Let’s get him to medical.”

 

* * *

 

 **xvi.**  
Pietro could see the surprise in Wanda’s face, as the people in medical checked him over. IVs slipped into his arms, things onto his fingers, tabs to his chest and brow, taking a myriad readings while another beeping machine scanned him. She glanced carefully, when the others were watching each other or watching him, her eyes darting and darting and darting. 

 _They don’t hate me_ , he saw her think.

His hand found hers, squeezed softly. _No one can hate you once they know you._

 

* * *

 

 **xvii.  
** They rested together as they had after Wanda’s nightmares, as they always did. Faces pressed to shoulders, hands around arms, curled into each other like serpents coiling, so intertwined as to be inseparable. For Pietro’s though… **  
**

Wanda knew that Pietro comforted himself by comforting her, twisted himself into a shape he had not been born to take, but had chosen to take all the same and chose anew each day. But now… now Pietro woke gasping from nightmares to Wanda’s hand pressed to his arm, an anchoring force to keep him from hurtling off. Wanda did not need comfort, did not need anything but to tuck her brother to her, offer him comfort he no longer knew how to take. 

The sigh Wanda gave was deep and tired, her lips pressed to hair, to temple, to cheek. Lips were pressed to lips in something that was not quite a kiss, breath mingling in the millimetre gap between skin. _Please,_  shone out of thought and memory. _Don’t make me lose you again._

Against her brow she felt Pietro shake his head, felt him pull back to have space to speak. “You won’t,” he promised, lifted his lips to her temple, crushed a kiss to the skin there. His voice was barely a breath. “You won’t lose me again.”

 

* * *

 

 **xviii.**  
It was odd during the day. Wanda watched the team adjust to her being no longer alone, to watching her sway and dance around her brother with the perfect ease she lacked with the team, that the team lacked with each other.

“ _How do you do it_ ,” Rhodey asked one day, watching Wanda where Pietro stood at her shoulder, not training but ready, prepared, a permanent fixture since his return.

Wanda shrugged. “We know,” she says. “We always have. We are parts of the same, in the end, and what organism doesn’t know where it is?”

(Pietro smiled, sharp and bright as a knifeblade. You would not think he quaked out of nightmares each night still.)

 

* * *

 

 **xix.**  
Pietro’s nightmares were still fierce. Wanda could see his mind, see the torn up well beneath the tree of it all, the water of his emotions and memories haemorrhaging out. They had risen wildly when she had found him, crystal clear waters of purpose but now…

Now the water is brackish with nightmares.

 

* * *

 

 **xx.  
** Her hands ran over his cheeks, soft over skin, sharp over stubble. “ _Please_. I can’t do much, I can only offer so much but _please_. Let me do this for you.” Her voice was a terrible thing, torn and sad and desperate and pleading all at once. “ _Please_ ,” she begged, thumbs pressed to his cheekbones, the word torn from her like a sob. “ _Please_.” **  
**

The cadence shifted. “ _Let me do this for you_.”

The world shifted, perception warped. This was his  _choice_.

(It had been so long since he had let himself have one.)

Pietro bowed his head towards her scarlet.

 

* * *

 

 **xxi.**  
Pietro’s mind without the nightmares (her scarlet coiling through it to keep them away as he slept) was soft and blue. The water rose up from the well with the crystal clarity of his purpose, did not flood, did not form brackish marshes, just rose and rose and fed the tree of his mind as it always had.

Wanda wears the headpiece almost constantly now, lets it bolster her re-growing powers of the mind. She could always feel Pietro, know his mind, but this makes it still easier, allows her to act preemptively, to protect his mind from himself and from others.

(It strengthens her scarlet of flesh and the world too, helps her manipulate smoke, drag air out of lungs, twist metal into circlets as though they are wax. She doesn’t tell the team this.)

Wanda sleeps sitting up, as Pietro so often had when she’d had nightmares. She sleeps sitting up, Pietro’s head in her lap, and keeps watch for nightmares.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the headpiece is meant to be a lil reference to her headpiece in comics. Comments are much appreciated!


End file.
